Best to get going. The walk back to the hotel, then the address on my phone, then Dominion Hall and whatever waited inside it. The morning had been an indulgence. The indulgence was over.
I started toward the edge of the market.
Then the bread found me.
Not the bread itself—the smell. Sourdough, fresh, with that tang underneath the crust-smell that said someone had been feeding a starter for years, maybe decades, and the bacteria had developed the kind of complexity that couldn't be rushed or replicated. I knew that smell. It was fermentation, and fermentation was one of the few sciences I'd learned not in a classroom but in a kitchen, watching my mother shape loaves on Saturday mornings while the ranch dogs waited by the back door for the scraps that never came because she didn't believe in wasting a crumb.
The stall was three tents from the exit. A simple setup—a table, a wooden sign, a man behind it with flour on his apron and the relaxed authority of someone who'd mastered one thing and was content to keep doing it forever. A line had stretched from the table all morning, judging by the depleted display—most of the baskets were empty, the shelves picked clean by people who knew what they were after and had shown up early to get it.
But right now, by some miracle of timing, the line was gone. And on the table sat a single loaf. Round, dark-crusted, the kind of golden brown that said it had been baked at the exact right temperature for the exact right time. It sat there like the last soldier standing.
I stepped up.
The proprietor looked at me, looked at the loaf, and laughed. "Just in time," he said, already reaching for a bag. "Another thirty seconds and I was going to eat it myself."
I almost smiled. Almost. Then two people stepped up behind me, close enough that I could feel the shift in the air, the casual pressure of a public space where personal boundaries operated on a different scale than I was used to.
A woman's voice, behind me and slightly to my left. "We're too late." Half to her companion, half to the universe. The tone was light, amused, resigned in the way people are when they've lost a small battle and decided to be gracious about it.
The proprietor bagged the loaf and held it out to me. I took it. The bread was warm through the paper, heavier than it looked, and smelled like something that deserved better than being eaten alone in a hotel room.
I turned to hand it to the women. Some instinct I didn't examine—generosity, or manners, or the particular code my mother had installed in me before I was old enough to resist it, the one that said when two people want the last of something and one of them is you, you give it up.
I turned.
And stopped.
She was?—
Dark hair. Long, the kind of long that took years and patience, falling over one shoulder in a way that looked effortless but probably wasn't. Deep brown eyes, the color of bourbon held up to firelight. Olive skin that caught the morning sun and did something with it that had no business being done at a farmers market. A body that existed under a flannel shirt and jeans in a way that suggested it existed considerably well under everything and didn't need anyone's confirmation.
But it wasn't the beauty that stopped me. I'd seen beautiful women. Had known a few. Had married one.
It was the look she gave me.
Somewhere betweenhiandwho the hell are you—direct, unafraid, curious in a way that had teeth to it. Not flirtatious. Not guarded. Just—present. The kind of look that said she saw what she was seeing and was deciding in real time what to make of it.
The words died somewhere between my brain and my mouth. They'd been simple words—here, take it—but they evaporated on contact with those brown eyes and left me standing there with a bag of bread in my outstretched hand and nothing useful to say.
"Hi," she said. Then she glanced at the woman beside her—gorgeous too, dark-haired, poised, a ring on her left hand—and both of them looked at the bread, then at me, and asked in near-perfect unison:
"Are you going to keep that?"
I'd forgotten I was holding it.
I looked down at the loaf. Looked back at her. My mouth opened and produced something about being hungry, which was technically true but came out sounding like I'd recently learned the language and wasn't confident in my conjugation.
Behind me, the proprietor made a sound. I didn't need to turn around to know what his face was doing. The sound alone saidget it together, man.
"I'll give you half," I said.
Why the fuck did I say that? I didn't want half a loaf of bread. I wanted—I didn't know what I wanted. I wanted to stop looking at this woman and feeling the ground shift underneath a morning that had been perfectly stable five seconds ago.
That was when it hit me.
Not her. Not the brown eyes or the dark hair or the flannel shirt or the way she stood, like she was used to being thesmartest person in whatever room she occupied but had learned to wear it quietly.
The vibe.
